Friday 13 February 2004, 6 pm ABC1

Black Friday Series Launch - The Child Artists of Carrolup

Black Tracker is a 1990s ABC documentry about the late police officer and tracker Sergeant Riley produced by the late Michael Riley. At its wrap up there is a beautiful piece of classsical music which then lasts throughout the creidts. The name of the music is not in the credits. ...

In 1945, the Carrolup School of the south west of Western Australia was flourishing. A messianic school teacher, Noel White, had appeared and through his open minded attitude, he nurtured the gifts and talents of the school children.

Transcript

Noel White with his wife Lily, introduced music and drawing. Their pupils confidence in their amazing gifts grew – the doodles became landscapes of the surrounding countryside – then as they wanted more time to develop their painting techniques the children asked if they could have evening lessons. The Whites were overjoyed at this positive response and so was born the Carrolup Child Artists.

Exhibitions followed locally and then eventually internationally mainly promoted by their patron Florence Rutter. The outcome was overwhelming praise and recognition.

However, this proved too much for the Department of Native Affairs and after just six years Carrolup was closed, with some of the children moving to a mission near Bunbury whilst the older children left school altogether.

One of the positive aspects of Carrolup was that the imagination and creativity of the Child Artists, during those short years under the tutelage and encouragement of the White family, was able to flow unabated, free, cementing their traditions. It exposed them to other possibilities. It laid down the foundations of a movement that continues today.

The Music Clip this week is the band Kross Kulcha singing “The Man He Was”.

Transcript of The Child Artists of Carrolup

RACHAEL MAZA: Hello and welcome to Message Stick. I'm Rachael Maza. During the 1950s in a remote corner of south-western Australia, the children of Carrolup Mission began producing landscape artworks of unique beauty with which they reached international acclaim. But in less than five years since they began painting, the mission school was closed down and many of the artists never painted again.

(FOGGY SUNRISE OVER A QUIET RURAL TOWN)

MAN 1: (Reads) "When I arrived at Carrolup, there were many other boys and girls there. The first two or three months, I was a bit worried for my parents. I was put in a big dormitory where I was given a bed to sleep in. At that time, I was treated very cruel. Two years after that, I was put into school. The native children, in the past, weren't given a chance to learn. But since Mr White took over, we are now getting people to respect us. Now, I am a little over 14. I'm starting to see new changes happening with us. Before Mr White came up to Carrolup, nobody ever heard the name of Carrolup. But now it is nearly known all over the world. Reynold Hart. Age 14."

DR JOHN STANTON, DIRECTOR, BERNDT MUSEUM OF ANTHROPOLOGY: Well, Carrolup's down in the...the great southern part of the South-West. It's really right in the middle of the South-West on the main road between Perth and Albany, near Katanning. There was a lot of pressure coming from local white townspeople who didn't really like to be reminded of the role that maybe some of their fathers and sons and things had had in creating what was then called a part-Aboriginal population. So there was pressure on the Government to remove the people of mixed descent, er, out of town. And there was a big pool, a very nice setting. And so people were, basically, forced to move there from the fringes of Katanning, which was quite a prosperous wheat belt town, out to Carrolup. And very soon after that, the Government, the Native Welfare Department, started building a...a facility of houses, a hospital and things like that, er, for the children to be housed there. The idea was that the girls would be trained for domestic service to work as servants, really, for local townspeople or people on farms, and a lot of them ended up there. And the boys, it was thought, might get some sort of other training.

MERVYN HILL, CARROLUP ARTIST: Mum went into town one day - it was the school holidays - and they took us children with them. And, er, we stayed the night in there. And the next morning she had to go and get her pension and get in stores and that. And we were intending to go home again because our dad was out at work anyway. And, um...got run into these...Carrolup people, missionary people collecting up all the Nyoongars. And I got reason to believe that, you know, the police is down the nigger-haters anyway. They want it done to... The bloke was saying, "Oh, you wanna get all these off the streets?" You know? "Send them out my way." That was happening to a lot of people. So, more or less, we was taken there against our will. More or less, well, you can put it down to be Stolen Generation, as far as I'm concerned.

DR JOHN STANTON: The conditions were very bad. I mean, there was not much going for the children. They were there with a series of indifferent and rather badly trained teachers. In fact, the teachers didn't have any training at all. They were positioned within the Department of Native Welfare who had responsibility for the children. It was a very disheartening kind of environment.

MERVYN HILL: I didn't like it when I first saw it. Did not like it one bit. The two dormitories, there was always...one was there for the boys and one for the girls. Yeah, well, you may as well say they were...they were prisons. After tea at night you got about 4:30 or 5:00, it was locked up. You were there until next morning. Then they'd come around in the night and visit you when they got no reason to because we got toilet facilities and everything in there. And they'd come and check on you and if they think you were making noise, they'd come and flog into you for no reason.

DR JOHN STANTON: So the kids didn't really have any opportunity to do anything at all, and yet, they were compelled to be there. It was really a concentration camp in the...in the real sense of the word. So when the Native Welfare Department decided to appoint professionally trained teachers, this was seen as the beginning of a new opportunity for the children. And this is really where the art thing came in because it was thought that if the...if the kids had an ability to do some drawing, that that should be encouraged. And, initially, it all came about because of the schoolteacher, Mr Noel White, and his wife Lily, who were the schoolteachers at the settlement.

(ROSS AND NOELENE WHITE ARE INTERVIEWED TOGETHER)

NOELENE WHITE, DAUGHTER OF NOEL WHITE: Dad was a primary school teacher in a little tiny place called Ningaloo. And one year, his, um, colleague came along, a lady, Mrs Elliot, came along. And she said, "Look, Noel," she said, "I'm teaching down at Carrolup but I can't manage the children. Have you ever thought about going down to an Aboriginal school?" So with a few enquiries and, er, and, I guess, negotiations, the next thing was we knew that in May, 1946, we were on our way down there.

DR JOHN STANTON: He realised, though, that the kids needed to get out of the settlement. It was too constraining. It was an institution. So he started taking the kids out of school for what he called rambles, for walks in the bush. And he expected the kids, when they came back from these walks, to...to reflect on what they'd seen and maybe write a little story. It started with a little story. And, very quickly, one or two of the boys started decorating the frame of their story page with a few, kind of, images, pencilled things - a kangaroo, a dog, a tree.

MICKY JACKSON, CARROLUP ARTIST: When the white teacher came out there, that started off this artwork. He said you don't draw a tree just like that with a bush around like that. Take it - see how that tree is in the ground? You do it like that. You take it from the bottom and you put all little limbs out. That's how you go, right to the top. And then you put bushes on the top. That's how you draw a tree.

He was a top man, too. Like he knew what we wanted, so he set us up in this world of art.

NOELENE WHITE: Dad would say to us, "Come down to the schoolroom after school and look at what so-and-so and so-and-so has done today."

(MONTAGE OF VIBRANT AUSTRALIAN LANDSCAPE PAINTINGS)

ROSS WHITE, SON OF NOEL WHITE: There were some outstanding ones. Like Revel Cooper.

NOELENE WHITE: Claude Kelly.

ROSS WHITE: Claude Kelly. Reynold Hart.

NOELENE WHITE: Yes.

NOELENE WHITE: Parnie Dempster.

ROSS WHITE: Yes.

NOELENE WHITE: And...to us as kids, we were just stunned by it. It was stunningly beautiful.

MAN 1: (Reads) "Carrolup school journal, 14 March, 1947. Much of the work of the pupils is showing great improvement. The children readily respond to singing... Owing to the interest taken by pupils during school hours many of them have come to me expressing a wish to work after school on the art subjects."

BOY 1: (Reads) "In school I like drawing. I'm pleased that Mrs White and Mr White are helping us here. Jim Dab, age 10."

MAN 1: (Reads) "A feature of school life is reflected in the enthusiasm of the pupils to attend the night classes that have been conducted. It is quite a punishment to keep them... Attention is being given to the art side of the lower school. Free forms, abstracts and corroboree are given full attention. It is interesting to see the development..."

BOY 1: "I like to draw and read in my spare time. Sometimes I go up the road for a walk to see if I could find a good tree for my artwork."

MAN 1: "The boys are preparing for their exhibition of art in Perth. Good work is being done and many of the children are keen."

DR JOHN STANTON: Even at the time, white people thought that people of mixed background simply couldn't have the aesthetics to make something called art. And that's why, when Mr White showed this art down at...at Education Department meetings and things like that, he was accused of lying, of doing that stuff himself to promote his own career and that it wasn't the kids at all. So he went, jumped in his car and drove all the way back, probably four hours, back to Carrolup, grabbed four of the kids who were there, took them down to Albany, sat the kids down. And the children, the four boys who were able to come down, sat there and in front of everybody produced these wonderful works in about 20 minutes each...flooring all the school teachers there, not only by the beauty of the works but how quickly they were created.

MICKY JACKSON: There was a race among ourselves. That was tops, that was. When we used to sit side by side and we used to say to one another, "You don't look at my painting and don't you do the same painting as I do. You do your own colours and I'll do my own." That's how we used to watch one another. And then, when we were finished, we used to put them side by side and look at it and work it out from there. "My trees are better than your trees," or something like..."My colours are better than yours." We used to have a competition there and it used to be tops.

DR JOHN STANTON: But no-one really knew...understood what was going on except Mr White and some of the teachers maybe, until somebody came from outside and looked at the stuff and said, "My God. This is unbelievable work," and that was Mrs Rutter.

NOELENE WHITE: Well, she was an English lady who was head of the Soroptimists' Club, ladies club. She'd heard about these children, someone had told her, and so she said, "I want to go and see them."

WOMAN 1: (Reads) "I was thrilled to see the work done by these children. The work by the older children is just marvellous. I believe a good market can be found for some of their very original designs. Altogether a very interesting, in fact, thrilling day. Florence Rutter, journal. 31 July, 1949."

DR JOHN STANTON: And she col...bought some of the works and took them off with her back to England. Showed them first around Australia and New Zealand as part of her soroptimist activities and then took them back to England. And it was really only when it was shown in England, given the kind of cultural cringe then of the period, perhaps continues some ways, that people here really took notice that here was the stuff being produced by these children that was world-class art. I think, from the...from the records that have survived there was quite a lot of jealousy that came from certain staff in the Department of Native Welfare...Native Affairs er, against the Education Department. Because it was the Education Department that was getting the kudos of what had happened at Carrolup.

NOELENE WHITE: Well, one of the things that would happen that used to make Dad really upset was that they...someone would come down and say, "We want six boys to go and do some...shovel gravel or dig holes..."

ROSS WHITE: Farmwork.

NOELENE WHITE: Farmwork. Now, there was a lot of young male adults doing nothing around the place. But they would haul these boys out of school to go and do this menial work. It wasn't just for a short time or once in a while. It was a very frequent thing. And Dad would refuse and say, "They're not going. They're going to stay in school." But this caused conflict and rows and fights. And um...um... Yeah, as a result, it was very unpleasant at times.

(FOOTAGE OF NOEL WHITE'S SCHOOL JOURNAL ENTRIES)

MAN 1: (Reads) "Tuesday, May 2, 1950. I regret to record further interference in the activities of the school. Two boys, Reynold and Parnell, have been entered in the Dunlop Art Competition to be held in May in Melbourne. These boys have been sacrificing their time after school by doing this extra work in the classroom. The attendant deliberately came to the schoolroom in my absence and ordered them out, shouting, 'Mr White is not your boss. You'll do what I tell you!' With that, the boys, crestfallen, were put onto the gravel pit. As we only have three more days to complete this work, I'm afraid this sort of interference will destroy all initiative to any extra work for the school."

DR JOHN STANTON: Mr White felt that if he achieved anything, the kids were being taken and redirected because Native Welfare thought, "Well it would be really good if these boys had some vocation. But, for God's sake, what are they going to do with art?" Maybe if they could dig a trench and fill it with, you know, stones or something, and rubble, that might be useful. The girls, as I said, were being trained to go into service but there was still this worry of the boys. Unfortunately, the Welfare, Native Welfare, really didn't have the inspiration to think, "Well, at least some of these kids could become great artists." Namatjira was all the rage at the time. Probably the only Austra...Aboriginal Australian that most non-Aboriginal Australians knew by name.

BOY 1: (Reads) "One day Reynold and I got keys off Mr White to go into the school to do some drawings. Just then, one of the attendants pushed us out and told us to work loading a truck with gravel."

MAN 1: (Reads) "I reminded the superintendent that no exhibitions or sale of work was possible if this uncooperative state of affairs existed. At present, an exhibition is to be held in London and scores of people are requesting artwork."

MAN 2: (Reads) "Perhaps I better confine myself to the directions which were finally given to Mr White by his Director of Education, Mr Murray Little. They were, that in the education of the boys in a way that will benefit them to take their place on terms of reasonable equality with the whites, it was not in their best interest to put the emphasis on art, which, at best, would never earn them a living and would, and at present, be treated only as an interesting curiosity. Yours sincerely, S.G. Middleton, Commissioner of Native Affairs. 13 September, 1950."

DR JOHN STANTON: The white community was increasingly concerned about the possible long-term effects of institutionalisation. I mean, there was consideration to those issues. And the Government decided to change policies. But they didn't always think of what the best arrangement was for some of these children. And that's where some of the tragedies endured beyond...beyond the days of Carrolup. They were simply given a new set of clothes, a new pair of shoes and two bob - two shillings - in their pocket, and literally chucked out the door, left to fend for themselves. Left to find their family if they could or find work as they could. And these were boys who were becoming leading exemplars of their art.

MICKY JACKSON: Yeah, we wasn't too good about leaving the place at all. We wanted it for ourselves so that we could do our artwork and everything else. We had something going there good.

WOMAN 1: (Reads) "Dear Mrs Rutter, It does seem a tragedy that one man can wreck the lives of so many. I can't help but think how wonderful things would have been for the children if Mr Middleton would have only kept to the promises he made us that day in the office. As for us, we've had to be very careful because these days things can be made very hard. And while we know we are right, the truth is often pushed to the background. Yours sincerely, Lily White."

NOELENE WHITE: It was the tragedy of it all. It really was. Some of the...some of the boys attempted to do some...did do some of the artwork afterwards. And, um... If you ever see any work from Carrolup, it's instantly recognisable. It's a style of its own. And you could pick it out a mile off from anywhere. And... But where all that beautiful artwork went to, we don't know. We only...Daddy only had a few pieces that we have here in the house. But the rest of it, it just all went.

(BLACK-AND-WHITE FOOTAGE OF BLEAK PRISON FACILITIES)

MAN 1: (Reads) "Dear sir, I have no doubt you will be surprised to hear from me. I guess, in a way, I have a mighty lot of explaining to do. I have no excuse to offer for the way I have carried on since I've left school. I am no good and I admit it. I know you would be interested to know at all times I have continued to paint. You once said that none of us boys would ever make a living out of art. These words have helped me tremendously. I am still out to prove you wrong. In the future I shall endeavour to do my utmost to live up to the principle of life that you have taught me. I know I am a big disappointment to you, sir. I trust you will forgive me and have faith in me to change my ways of living. Remember me to Mrs White, sir. I remain yours respectfully, Revel Cooper."

DR JOHN STANTON: Well, I think it's an inspiration that they did manage to do something like this out of nowhere without any precursor. There was nothing to indicate that this was going to happen at all. And I think it speaks a great deal for people's spirit and...and optimism, in fact, for the future. As well as looking back into an imagined past or semi-imagined past, it was also thinking a lot about the future. And these kids who lived in cold conditions in winter, hot conditions in summer, minimal clothes, poor food, poor health sometimes - and yet, once they started this...this drawing for Mr White, they became enthralled with it. Imagine an art industry that didn't take until the 1970s to get off the ground. It was there, off the ground in 1951. Where would those artists be today?

MICKY JACKSON: There was Revel Cooper in Roelands and Barry Loo...and Reynold Hart...Parnell Dempster... I think they've all just about died, eh? We haven't got too many artists like myself.

RACHAEL MAZA: And the clip we bring you this week is from Kross Kulcha singing 'The Man He Was'. If you want more information on any of the programs, check out the Message Stick site on abc.net.au/message. And we'll see you next week.

(KROSS KULCHA PLAY LIVE IN THE ABC STUDIO)

KROSS KULCHA: (Sings) # He sits and wonders why # The sun sets, the golden sky # He wonders why # The piece he left around # Long lost and can't be found # He wonders why # All of them days before # Slowly creeping out the door # If he had his only way # He'd be the one today # And all the man he was # He sits and wonders why # The sun sets, the golden sky # He wonders why # Light the candle without a flame # Like a man without a name # He wonders why # All of them days before # Slowly creeping out the door # If he had his only way # He'd be the one today # And all the man he was # The man he was # All of them days before # Slowly creeping out the door # If he had his only way # He'd be the one today # And all the man he was # If he had his only way # He'd be the one today # And all the man he was # The man he was. #